


somewhere cold

by infinateuniverse



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Basically what if Christopher died in the tusnami, Character Death, Family, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Love/Hate, Other, Religious Conflict, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Tsunami (9-1-1 TV), Unhealthy Relationships, What-If, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:01:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28558773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinateuniverse/pseuds/infinateuniverse
Summary: For five days they search.On the fifth day they’re called to a hospital.A body has been found matching Christopher’s description.
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley & Christopher Diaz & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV), Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz, Evan “Buck” Buckley & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 108





	somewhere cold

**Author's Note:**

> TW: There is a part in this fic where Eddie beats up Buck, fair warning on that.

For five days they search. Eddie goes from the VA hospital setup to the morgue littered with bodies. He searches through boats drenched in water, in trees filled with empty clothing. With scraps of teddy bears and other game prizes. His eyes remain wide and impassive, staring from face to face of cold blue lips and greying eyes. He does not let the ever constant reminder of death shake him. He feels Buck’s revulsion, his pure empathy of horror and sadness. Of grief. But he stows his own away in a deep place filled with swarming flies.

Buck doesn’t try to apologize or speak to him again, not unless it’s directions, or instructions. They’re on a mission. Soldiers in a battlefield where the very enemy is God himself, a natural disaster, fate, and the inevitability of one’s own death foretold. Unhelpled. Unavoidable. He thinks that maybe he should know what this is like, give up or something because he watched the life drain from his wife, too, but that was in front of him. That was real.

This. This chaos around him holds no proof of Christopher. No body or reason expect the fact that it’s been hours. It’s been days, and there is no sign of his body. Of his striped tee shirt and sneakers with the lightning bolts on the side. He’s gone and there’s a hole here, as though he is being punched over and over, the hole expanding. His heart leaving. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything, eat or sleep. All that consumes him is his son.

Buck offers no niceties or sureties. He stands by his side, silent and guilty, weighed down horribly. The only thing keeping him upright is the one that they both love most in this world. The best kid there ever was or is. There is no body, and yet there is no hope either. Because the water is fading, and as everything becomes clear, he does not.

“You need to eat.” Hen says, gently but firmly.

“And rest.” Offers Maddie, a kindness in her tone that neither deserves.

Eddie looks to Buck and it’s all that’s needed before Buck says quickly, “We’re fine.” Somewhere along the line it became, _we_. Maybe it always had been.

They leave and they search. They look and they feel like they’re sinking into nothingness. Eddie feels the sands of time like actual sand, quicksand, and the more he struggles against it, the more it pulls him under. He thinks of Christopher’s laughter. Of the picture with the stack of seventy two pancakes, maybe seventy four. The way Christopher touched his face and woke him up with, “Time for operation Buck, dad.”

_Operation Buck_. To bring him out of his funk and get back to life. To a life that he has. Eddie remembers thinking at the time that it’s just a job, and it is. But he never understood how Buck felt like he had nothing. Because that was not nothing. Buck has them he had- he has Christopher. He had him. That should have been enough.

“Do you feel like you’ve lost everything now, Buck? Or does it still feel like the job was everything?” It comes out in an echo of pain, and anger and hurt, but it falls flat because his voice is flat. Eddie feels hollow and gutted, and nothing is okay. Nothing is right in the world. A world where tsunamis take children away, swallowing them under until nothing is left or seen since. A world where a woman, a mother finally getting a second chance is struck so suddenly and so brutally. Taken away just before salvation is offered, just barely touched.

He feels with some faraway and distant satisfaction as Buck behind him crumbles under Eddie’s words, falls into himself. Expect he doesn’t really fall, only falters. They’re on a mission. Today they’re soldiers. Buck stays standing. And so does Eddie.

-

On the fifth day they’re called to a hospital. A body has been found matching Christopher’s description. They walk into the morgue, alone, just him and Buck. Eddie feels Buck’s heat, his humanity behind him and he wonders aimlessly if this is where he loses his. If that sheet will pull back and- and hell will come with it. High waters. 

“He was one of the victims of the tsunami, he hit his head pretty hard and drowned. He would have been unconscious. It would have been quick.” The coroner says gently, as gently as anyone can when a child is laid before them, gone too soon. Too quick.

The sheet is pulled back and Christopher’s eyes stare back. Closed, but no lingering doubt as to what’s behind them. Where lips used to turn up in dimples, now there is only a slab, a plain nothing. And it’s more horrible than the worst torture man has created. Eddie feels the tears come before he can even register what exactly is happening. They come and they come and he’s falling, crumbing into the warm body of his best friend. The one who he trusts most in the world. The one who did this.

He’s sobbing, clutching and clawing into the abyss of endless suffering. Everything that is good is gone, and he’s lost. He asks himself the stupidest things. He asks, “ _Where did he go? Where are you? Where did he go?_ ” Because he was here and then he wasn’t. Now it’s empty. It’s nothing and he will never be again. And it’s worse because- because he was alone.

“Shh, Eddie, shh. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” Buck’s words are supposed to be soothing but they’re lost in the chaos of his own pain, his own suffering. He cries and he screams, and they intermingle until they don’t know where one’s grief begins and the other ends.

And Eddie prays, except that he’s not really praying because he’s yelling. He’s screaming to God, and God is eerily silent. And in his silence, he is speaking.

-

Eddie sits in the back of an SVU that he does not recognize. He comes back to himself in furls of clouds that smoke together and moves in winds of change and time. He feels Buck beside him, looks to find Buck’s eyes lost out the window into a world that Eddie doesn’t recognize anymore. Someone is driving but Eddie doesn’t know who. Everything is fast and slow, and time ceases to exist. It all become some terrible flat circle. No longer from one point to another, it’s all the same. All at once.

He sees Christopher being put in his arms for the first time. Shannon’s exhausted smile. Her love. His own. Christopher’s. He sees them setting up his first crib, Shannon bent over big and wide, and ready to get their son out into the world, so that he can see such beautiful things. Eddie feels the grass beneath his fingers at the age of ten playing hide and seek, and tag with his two sisters, older than himself and bossy, but fiercely protective and strong. He’s thirty one and Buck is telling him that he can have his back. He’s helping Christopher blow out his candles on his seventh birthday, the one right after Shannon left. Just them now. Just them.

Eddie blinks and Buck is bringing over pizza, and they’re watching movies together. Eddie tastes the beer filled with no alcohol because of the blood. Eddie’s fifteen, making out with Susan Thomas in a storage closet in high school, and he’s nervous and scared, but it was a dare and her lips taste like cherries. He’s looking through a barrel of a gun and shooting, firing. Killing. Suddenly he’s over a body, too small. Too young.

“Eddie?”

Chimney turns around, eyes on him from the passenger seat, Maddie’s looking through the rear-view mirror. Why is she driving? Eddie wonders. Why isn’t he?

“Are you- I mean, obviously you’re… Is there anything we can get you?”

_My son._

He closes his eyes as a fresh wave of grief rolls over him. Warm hot tears spill over and he falls back, wading into the silence of space. Empty air. The only thing that allows him to take his next breath, is the very notion and idea, the certainty that he will die, too. Somehow, someway, and he will be wherever Christopher is. And that is enough, enough to breathe. For now. For now it’s all he’s got.

“Leave him alone.” Buck says sharply, but his tone isn’t as harsh as Eddie is sure he meant it to be, instead it is still with grief, a paper thin veil of self-control. Eddie wants to hate him, but he doesn’t have the energy to hate and to lose, so he slips away.

“I’m just asking, Buck.” Chimney’s voice is soft, sorry.

Everyone is so sorry.

-

He wakes up to sunshine and for a moment Eddie forgets. He sees the yellow bands of colour and energy, and it’s just another day. He pretends it’s his bed and that any moment Christopher will come running in. Telling him about phase 2 of Operation Buck. Insisting on pancakes that Eddie always burns, but that Buck always makes perfectly. For a few precious moments his son isn’t dead.

There’s a world where he is alive and everything is okay, but then he sits up and feels every lump in Buck’s couch mattress. He’s in a world where Christopher is gone and nothing is okay. This is not his world. Not the one he wants. Never. The tears come and grief pulls him under again, but more harshly this time more terrible. He lives it over and over and it’s like forgetting and remembering, and he cries. He screams and punches, and Buck is there but it doesn’t matter. He would kill Buck himself in an instant to bring his son back. _And Buck would let him._ He knows that better than he knows anything else. The only thing that makes any kind of sense right now.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Eddie.” Buck says like it means anything. He doesn’t care that Eddie hits him, pushing him away, instead he just brings him closer. Let’s Eddie drool and slobber, snot everywhere into his shirt. On him. A messiness of loss that no one tells you about. A tidal wave that calms down in hiccups and tissues, and the urge to just make it s _top_. To make it all stop. To forget. Anything but the truth. The reality of a nightmare world.

“Tell me what to do.” Buck whispers brokenly into his hair, Eddie’s own face pushed into his neck. He feels Buck’s tears dampening in his hair and he thinks, _good_. _Make him suffer, too_. “Please, Eddie, just tell me what to do.” 

He sounds young. Like a child. Lost in his own sea of nothingness. Because nothing matters anymore. Everything is emptied away and gone. And- And this miracle, every little moment that made Christopher, it’s all gone. Drained into an ocean. A decaying nothingness.

“Stay with me.” Eddie tells him, his voice hoarse and raw, and with exhaustion creeping in. Tremors rocking his body as the heat from Buck envelopes him, even when he doesn’t want it, too. Even when he’s tired of it. Tired of it all. “Just... Don’t leave me alone, Evan, please.” He doesn’t know his own voice, it’s empty, hollow, and it reflects everything that he is now. Ever will be again. “Stay with me.”

He feels Buck still, choking on his breath before promising it. Promising anything. He holds Eddie closer, even when Eddie himself stops holding back and says, _“Always._ ”

-

They bury Christopher next to his mom in a graveyard filled with the lost memories of men and women who fade into the sky of a new tomorrow. Christopher’s grave is smaller. Smaller than Shannon’s, and yet he lays next to her in the arms of a mother who lost so much time with him. Now she has too much.

“It’s all so terribly unfair, isn’t it?” Someone says as they stand before the dirty being piled on top a coffin made for a child. Eddie doesn’t say anything. He feels his parents crying, his mom’s tears, and his dad’s hand on his shoulder, warm and firm, and almost loving. Almost sorry, but then they’re leaving, too. Everyone disappears and Eddie is left watching as the dirt piles on. Someone says that maybe he should leave, too, but how can he?

“Leave it.” Buck’s voice is hoarse and stern, and like a Pitbull. A guard dog that Eddie never asked for but got all the same. Maybe even needs. He wishes everyone would just leave him the hell alone. No one cares about Christopher like does. No one could ever love him like he will. The only one that could is lying dead next to him, but maybe he’s lying to himself. Because maybe that’s easier.

It’s half way filled when Eddie reaches out and grabs a shovel from one of the gravediggers. He has wide eyes and looks uncertain, but something in Eddie’s face must say enough, maybe even in Buck’s, because he lets it go. Eddie pushes into the soft earth and fills the smallness of a life so big. Reduced to… This- this hole in the ground.

“You going to help, Buck? Or are you just gonna stand there?” He’s staring down into the dirt as he asks, his voice more harsh the quieter it becomes. He doesn’t know if he’s asking or forcing him to do this. Either way it doesn’t matter, Buck does. Eddie feels a grim satisfaction in it, a horrible feeling of ugliness that strikes through his grief like a knife made for butter. _That’s right, help me bury my son. The one you lost. The one you killed._

It’s not Buck’s fault, but all he can do is blame and hate, and hurt. It’s all he knows, and watching Buck’s tears mix with the grain of sweat somehow makes him feel better just as much as it makes him feel worse. “Did he let go?” Eddie says to Buck, to the full grave he never wanted to bury. “Or did you?”

Buck swallows something down and looks up. He looks like he wants to say something, mouth open to, but then he stops himself and he just _can’t._ All Eddie can say to that is, “That’s what I thought.”

He keeps digging, tired of looking at him. Buck’s words come then, because of course they do. “E- Eddie-” He chokes on it, and Eddie doesn’t want to hear it. So without looking up he just says harshly, “Dig.”

Buck buries instead.

-

Eddie’s parents leave, a last whisper of, “You should have left him with us.” Eddie can’t say anything. His fists clench together and he bites his lip, swallowing the blood before slamming the door of Buck’s apartment behind them. Them long gone. Finally. His shoulders are tense and a rage builds. One that he has denied for so long. Since Shannon. Since before any of that. It consumes him, and Buck coming up behind him, a hand on his shoulder and words gently saying, “They’re gone, are you okay?” Is enough to let it all lose. Let it out. Consume and devour.

He pushes Buck away and turns around, words biting into him, into each other, “OF COURSE I’M NOT OKAY. I HAD TO BURY MY SON!” And he hits him and he doesn’t stop. He punches and he kicks, and he hurts. He bleeds raw blood and skin, torn from his knuckles, taking chunks out of himself just as much as he is out of Buck. They’re on the ground, Eddie straddling him and there’s a fist breaking bone. It cracks and crunches and blood mixes with tears and snot, and it’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s terrible, and ugly. And Eddie falls back in the wake of it all. His shoulders hunch over and he’s sobbing and screaming, and trying to claw his way out but he can’t because he can never get out of this nightmare. This nightmare where his son is dead and it’s his best friend’s fault.

And Buck. He lays there in blood and he takes it. Broken bones and a rattle in his breath as he tries to breathe, he takes it, and he doesn’t try to run. He keeps his promise and he stays. He inhales blood and guilt, and horror, and he stays right there. Eddie is screaming not just for Christopher, but for Buck, too, for himself. Because he’s nothing anymore. A consumer of pain of everything around him, sucking in and spitting it out like black hole or maybe the worst monster possible.

_A father._

He cries until he can’t anymore, until he has to get up and look for a first aid kit. He brings it to Buck first and watches with terrible understanding and reality, and still some satisfaction as Buck flinches away. But he doesn’t leave. He stays and comes closer, and he waits. He waits for whatever Eddie wants. Eddie just wants him to stop bleeding. He pushes a gauze to his nose and watches as Buck both flinches and then stills in surprise. His eyes meet Eddie’s and his lip wobbles with whatever he sees. His hand reaching up and cupping over Eddie’s to press the gauze tighter to his bloodied and broken nose. Eddie lets him. And he’s too tired to hate, exhausted even, so he loves instead and it’s worse somehow, to love then to hate.

Eddie cleans him up, and Buck does the same for him. Buck has a shower first and Eddie has one after, sitting in the hot water until it runs cold. When he gets out he puts on Buck’s clothes and crawls into bed with him. They don’t say anything, but nothing needs to be said. Buck pulls him into himself, and Eddie exhales a shaky breath into Buck’s bruised shoulder.

He doesn’t apologize, and Buck doesn’t ask him, too.

-

Buck has nightmares. He wakes up screaming Christopher’s name, and Eddie holds him. He presses Buck tightly into himself, one hand on his back, the other curled into his hair. Tugging and pressing tightly enough so that it hurts, to ground him, but not enough to cause damage. Just enough for Buck to wake up sobbing and trying to breathe. Eddie half suffocates him and half comforts him in a deadly force of _, ‘will I? Or won’t I?’_

Part of him wants to kill Buck. Rip his life apart like Buck allowed the tsunami to do to Christopher, but the other part wants him here. Close. _His._ “We’re in your apartment.” He tells Buck once his breathing has evened out somewhat. “In your bed, and he’s still dead. You don’t have to keep looking for him, Buck, he’s already in the ground.”

A fresh wave of tears falls into Eddie’s shirt and it’s a comfort and a horror. Eddie’s own comes to in these moments. These moments in-between the others that are full of sunlight and the real world. Where a part has to be played. Here, with Buck pressed into each other, there are no parts. He can hate Buck and love him, and no one has to know. No one has to know his cruelty or his mercy. The darkness on one side, and the light on the other, intermingled and brought together into something new and terrifying. A person he doesn’t know. A nothingness he falls into easily, without trying to, with ease. And Buck lets him.

“E- Eddie.” Buck chokes out, and Eddie doesn’t let him get away. He holds him tightly, tighter, and presses his cheek into the top of Buck’s hair. Exhaling his own grief into him, as though it’s come kind of credit that can be transferred. His eyes slip shut and he says, “Shh.” Buck listens. He’s quiet. Silent in the darkness that surrounds them both. In this nightmare world.

“I don’t dream.” Eddie whispers to Buck, as though it were a secret just between them. “I want to, but I- I can’t.” His words break there, and he takes a deep breath to stop it. “I’d even take the nightmares, just if- Just as long as I could _see him_.”

There’s a drawn out silence next and Eddie can feel Buck thinking, wondering if he should speak, attempt to. He doesn’t.

“Tell me, Buck, what does he look like? What does he say?” Eddie asks, not really sure what he’s asking, or what he wants to know. What exactly he’s doing. If he wants Buck to hurt more, or if he wants himself to. “Does he miss me?”

Buck gulps something down and says into the heat that is them now, “He’s drowning. He’s calling for me… For you. But he’s brave, Eddie, he’s so brave.”

Eddie chuckles weakly, and wetly as he says with some kind of horrible humour tinged in his voice, “No one is brave when they die. No one. We try to be- they try, but we can’t. Basic fear. Basic mistrust. We slip into a world of nothing, and not even the best faith can’t make that okay. Make it right.”

“He’s somewhere good.”

“How can I know that?” Eddie whispers hoarsely. “He’s just… _gone._ ”

Buck breathes into him and says, “I thought you believed in Heaven.”

“I think I believe in Hell now.” _Because that’s where I am._

-

Eddie wakes up one morning to Buck dressed in that ridiculous Fire Marshal uniform and for some reason that makes him laugh, big and ugly, and unfairly. Because Christopher won’t, ever again. Buck looks to him and smiles crookedly, but it looks like it hurts, as though he hasn’t done it forever.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asks.

“We need the money.” Buck says simply, sadly as his eyes drift downwards. _We._ His fingers continue to button up the shirt, and then he’s ready. Gone with a hot cup of coffee pushed into Eddie’s hands and a lingering kiss along his head. It’s unexpected but Eddie takes the comfort from it, just as much as that anger coils up within.

He watches Buck go and thinks, _you’re breaking your promises again._

Eddie wanders downstairs, the coffee making him jittery, needing to move, and when he gets there he sits on the couch and lets his eyes drift closed, just for a moment, but when he opens them again, the sun has moved, and the world has darkened. He looks to the kitchen and hears Christopher’s peals of laughter. So close. Close enough to touch and feel, his own reverberating throughout his chest, the knives on the kitchen counter glistening in the wake of it.

When Buck comes home, clearly exhausted, nose still not fully healed, Eddie is still sitting on the couch. He looks to him and says, “You should hide the knives.” Because just in case Heaven is real, and that is where Christopher is, then he needs to get there some way, somehow. Someday. He’s always been taught ever since he was a boy that killing yourself is a sure fire way to go the opposite.

Buck pales and looks from Eddie to the knives, then back again, understanding dawning on his face. “E- Eddie?”

Eddie’s chest is tight and all he can do is look back to the darkened sky and listen to the faint laughter that echoes in his mind.

-

“This isn’t healthy, Buck.” Maddie’s voice is angry and honest, loud in a way that makes Eddie’s head ache. His whole body ache. He’s in Buck’s bed, face pressed into his pillow, but Buck’s warmth is gone. It’s just him, alone, and he’s angry for it. Buck said that he wouldn’t leave him alone, but he did. Does.

“Shh!” Buck half whispers, half yells. “You’ll wake him up.”

“I don’t care. Look at yourself. You have a broken nose, and you were bleeding all over my car just a few weeks ago. You up and stop coming to work, then you file a lawsuit!? I know Eddie is going through hell, and you are too, but he doesn’t need to be dragging you down with him. Evan, look at what he’s done to you.”

Her voice is breaking on his name, the same way Eddie’s breaks on Christopher’s.

_I lost him, Eddie._

“I- I fell down.” Buck tells her.

“Really? You know I used to say that about Doug, right?”

“That was different.”

“Was it?”

“I lost him, Maddie. I did! I did this!” Buck’s voice is half yelling now, angry and hurt, and Eddie’s heart feels like it’s being squeezed to death. He was numb but now, now he feels and it’s awful, and horrible, and Buck is making excuses for him. But not for himself.

“It was an accident, Evan. It was terrible and horrible accident, but it was an accident.” Maddie’s voice breaks, they’re all breaking now it seems. “Eddie doesn’t have the right to ask you to give up your whole life for him.”

“I took his away, Maddie.” Buck’s crying. Silently and softly, and he’s sniffling into, probably into his hand. His next words more sure than anything. “Of course he does.”

“Buck…”

“Please, just go Maddie. We don’t need you here.”

“I’m not going. I’m not leaving you like this.” Her words are filled with guilt ad regret and it tastes awful in the air. “Not again.”

Buck’s voice is dangerous, and Eddie holds no qualms with believing him when he says, “Leave, or I’ll make you.”

“ _Evan_.” But she leaves. The door slams shut and locked quickly, a new key being put away in the bowl by the door, her spare one. Buck climbs the stairs and when he gets up there and finds Eddie awake, he stops. He stares. Eddie stares back.

“You’re awake.” Buck says into the atmosphere of a room filled with grief, a bed left unwashed for weeks. The only thing Eddie’s been able to do is sleep and awaken. Awaken and sleep. Over and over. Coffee. Food. _Touch._

“Is she gone?” Is all Eddie can get out, all he knows to say.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He slips back under the covers and feels the hesitation in Buck’s steps before he walks closer, sitting on the edge of the bed with a heaviness that Eddie feels in his own limbs. “So… The lawsuit… Um…” Buck takes an audible deep breath. “I found a lawyer and he says I have a good chance of a multi-million dollar buyout. Um, a settlement. Because they won’t let me work even though I’m fine.”

Eddie hates the idea. He can feel his fingers curling up, balling up into something terrifying, but then Buck speaks again saying, “We could take the money and- and you could do anything with it. Anything that you want to.”

 _“We.”_ Eddie corrects him, a lump in his throat as his eyes slip shut. Because it’s them now. Together. The tears slip through, and down, soaking his pillow. He needs to get up. To do something. Anything, but he’s stuck. Lost in a moment that replays over and over again. Christopher’s small hands slipping into his, wrapping around his thumb, squeezing with a grip that could rival a giant’s. Christopher’s first steps, older than most kids, but nothing less of a miraculous and beautiful sight. His soft first words of, ‘dada.’ Shannon’s pout at his name winning out. Bare feet in warm grass as he chases after him under a hail of water droplets, a sprinkler descending on them both. The first hello, and the last, mixed up together in a circle where it never begins and never ends even though it already has. Already has been.

“Yeah.” Buck whispers, and Eddie can hear the own lump in his voice. Can hear his own suffering, and somehow that makes it better, and worse, and something he can’t quite describe. “We.”

-

In a few weeks is the deposition. A week after that they want to settle. It’s in the millions, and Buck signs it with Eddie’s nod of gross approval. A sick feeling in his stomach as though he just got paid for the death of his son, even though all the money is in Buck’s name. But that’s just it isn’t it? Buck’s name. Buck’s idea. Buck. Buck. _Buck._

Eddie wants to scream, instead he has a shower and gets dressed, and runs until he can’t breathe, until it hurts to, physically instead of the other way around. When he gets back it’s to find Buck sitting on his couch, head in his hand and worry on his lips. “Where have you been? I was worried.”

Eddie can’t breathe. Or speak. So instead he goes into the bathroom and showers for the rest of the day, water raining down. Eyes slipped shut still fully clothed, pretending that it’s a sprinkler, and that Christopher is right here. That they’re running through it together. Picking him up in his arms, his baby smell still there. Him, still here.

-

Buck trails after him when he goes home. He opens the door and it smells like he never left. A thin layer of dust is everywhere, but other than that, the blanket on the couch is still haphazardly thrown on. The TV switched off, but Eddie knows that if he clicked it on it would be playing that kids channel Christopher loves. _Loved._ The kitchen still has old dishes in the sink, and the fridge is full of food, leftovers from his pepe who always sends stuff over because he can’t cook. Beer with no alcohol in it, because Buck can’t drink on blood thinners. Pancake mix on the bottom shelf because they’re Christopher’s favourite, the ones that he always burns and that Buck cooks perfectly.

He steps into the hallway, a creak under his foot until he’s in front of his son’s bedroom. He pushes the door open and pushes back a sob just the same. A sudden urge to hit and punch, and scream. It coils in his stomach like a snake waiting to strike, but as soon as his eyes land on that colouring set, on the pens and markers scattered around a new drawing of all three of them at the pier, it all comes crashing down. Unfurling into unfair suffering. He vainly presses a hand to his mouth to stop it, but it comes out anyway, and suddenly he’s crouched down crying over an imaginary scenario that never happened and that should have. He should have been with him. He should not have died alone.

Buck tries to touch him but Eddie shakes him off and they find themselves sitting in the broken pieces of a life barely grown, barely made into anything. All Christopher will ever be is in this room. A child full of wonder and life, full of drawings and lego blocks. He wanted to be a firefighter, or someone who could help people. He wanted to help.

What kind of fucked up world takes that away?

“I’m tired of the heat.” Eddie says into the impression of Christopher in every corner. He sees him running from one thing to the next. Attempting to put his socks on by himself, and succeeding. A smile on his face big and wide as he shows his dad his toes wiggling inside. His little superman.

“Then we’ll go somewhere cold.” Buck’s voice is filled with promise.

He gets up and closes the door, and doesn’t look back. They leave and all Eddie says as Buck drives them back is, “Somewhere cold.” Somewhere else. Anywhere but here. He can’t even look at Christopher’s things for too long, or really at all because all he sees is _him_ and it’s horrible and painful, and every good memory is tarnished with one of a small body on a morgue slab, too young too have died. Lungs filled with water and brain with blood that will never dry. A hole in the ground big enough for a child’s coffin. He sobs into his hands and he bangs against the dashboard of Buck’s car but nothing makes it right and nothing ever will, and all he wants to do, every single part of him, every fibre of his being wants to die. To be with him. To be wherever Christopher is, but he can’t.

He can’t because he made a promise. A promise to the only dream he ever had since that night his world died, descending into this nightmare. A promise to an image, a fading life- a ghost of a son. Of the best kid there is.

“Tell me what to do, Eddie, and- and I’ll do. I swear, I will. Just tell me what to do.” Buck’s begging, asking for something that Eddie can’t give him. Something he’s not sure he ever will. So they sit in silence and Eddie’s shoulders racks in grief while Buck’s sag in guilt. “Just tell me what to do.”

-

They’re somewhere in Canada, Eddie doesn’t care where, only that it’s no longer warm and there’s no longer so many people. He feels like he can breathe a little easier. On the plane ride here, Buck clutched the seat like he was dying, as they took off he panicked, and wordlessly Eddie offered his own hand. Buck took it and held on. He’s still holding on as they get off, into a new country and a new world.

“Welcome to Canada.”

They buy a car and drive to a ranch somewhere close to the Arctic Circle, where Canada ends and a world of international proportions begins. Filled with polar bears and the sun disappearing for days. It’s an old property, the house is almost falling apart, and there’s no heating, at least not yet. Buck looks horrified and sorry as he says around some rumble of stone, “I’m so sorry, Eddie.”

Eddie can’t help but think almost darkly, _as least he’s not apologizing for…_

“It’s going to be a lot of work.” Eddie says as he looks around, nodding to himself because something is blooming in his chest. Something that tastes a little too close to hope and possibility. And so soon after Christopher, that can’t happen. It’s not fair, or right. He decides then that maybe he needs to forget. To push it away and what better way than to work. To build, and create.

He looks to Buck and tries to smile for his sake, for his own more so. “I think we can do it. Don’t you?”

Buck stares at him like he’s lost his mind before slowly a smile starts to spread across his features. He nods, too. “Y- yeah, I think we can. We should probably start a fire first, though.” He rubs his arms despite the warmest winter jackets they could find and Eddie starts to realize that maybe he’s cold, too. So he turns to the pile of wood and reaches for his lighter. The fire place in the far end of the room still working.

-

It takes three years to get the house up in order. During that time, they share a sleeping bag in front of the fire place surrounded by the rubble. They wear their winter jackets through the night and learn to stifle Buck’s nightmares with physical touch. Eddie still doesn’t dream, but he minds it less and less as the days go on. They cook over the fire, mostly cans of things, beans and soup, Eddie doesn’t really care and Buck never complains. Food lost its interest for him a long time ago.

“We should get a plumber.” Buck will say, or an electrician. Whatever he thinks they need, but Eddie’s response is always the same, “We can do it.”

Eddie finds out gradually how much land they have and how Buck put it all in Eddie’s name. He doesn’t comment on it, but after the two year mark he does go into town to a small library that stands there and uses one of the old computers to change it to the both of them. They get water going first, then they reconstruct the living room, and Eddie learns how to clean a fireplace. He’s surprised they hadn’t died sooner. _Too bad_ , is the vague thought that passes through and by.

The kitchen isn’t something Eddie cares about much, he can’t cook, truly, but Buck does so they make it bearable. There’s a pantry attached that’s big and they keep it as it is. Just in case. Around this time Buck mentions how they have acres here that’s just theirs. That this used to be an old farmhouse back in the twenties. Eddie nods like he’s listening, but he’s cold so he just pushes closer into Buck’s warmth and drifts asleep somewhere in the history about bank foreclosures.

There’s three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a basement downstairs that’s more of a cellar, more shelves and things that they keep. A shed out back, and a barn. They fix those up too, and soon it’s been three years of this. Eddie sinks into the couch, into Buck’s embrace and asks, “What now?”

Buck shrugs as the fire cackles into the corner. Both of them liking it too much to get rid of it completely. There’s no TV here, only books and games, and puzzles. They’re mostly for Buck. Eddie finds that he enjoys the silence and the nothingness much more, the soft howl of Arctic winds falling onto them all.

“It was a ranch.” Buck says as Eddie absentmindedly runs his fingers through his hair. He feels Buck breathe, tickling along his neck and it feels real. Feels like enough.

Eddie’s eyes slip shut as he says, “Let’s get some horses then.”

-

Nothing is perfect, far from it in fact, but as long as Eddie keeps busy he can stop thinking about the past. About heat and water. About drowning and coffins too small. The feel of grass on his feet, of first words and gunfire. There are days where all he wants to do is kill Buck. Skin him alive, beat him until he’s black and blue, but there are also days where they ride their horses Beverly and Beatrice through the green trees of a taiga so big, one could get lost in it forever, smiles on their lips. Laughter in their hearts. Days where Eddie can see Christopher standing with Buck in his little garden, helping all the while.

Days where Eddie can almost see himself showing Christopher how to brush the horses down. Where they’re all picking wild berries and canning things for the winter. There are days where he can’t get out of bed, and days where he can’t bring himself to lay down. Days where Eddie has to ride out somewhere and disappear, get lost in nature and try to hold onto a world that can be both terrible and beautiful.

A nightmare wrapped in a dream. He falls in love slowly and when he realizes, he wonders if he’s always loved Buck. But he doesn’t tell him. He never says the words, or lets anything go beyond pressing his body against his own, clothing between them, because he thinks of Heaven. Of God. Of where Christopher might be- _must be_. So he never goes further, and Buck never makes him.

They exist together, beginning where the other ends, and the world is so full and so empty all at once, it’s overwhelming, it’s _unreal._

“We should get a horse and name him Buck.” Eddie says without thinking one night as they’re sitting on their second hand couches, Buck with a puzzle in front of him, tongue sticking out as he tries to put it back together again. Eddie with a book on plants in the area, trying to figure out what can be sold and kept.

Buck pauses his puzzle solving and looks up to Eddie, and Eddie looks back, and before either can blink they’re laughing. Big bellowing laughter that fills the room and hurts them as they double over. Hanging onto each other, they laugh like they’ve never laughed before or since. Big fat rolling tears falling down, dripping into a hollow grief both have neither spoken of or acknowledged in front of the other since… Since before.

The silence that follows is deathly, echoing their grief against the other, Buck whispers what they both know, “Christopher would have loved it here.”

And because forgiveness is impossible, even in the face of love, Eddie whispers back, “Then you shouldn’t have let him die.”

Buck flinches away and they don’t speak of him again. But when it’s time to sleep, Eddie still crawls into their bed, because they have their own rooms but they only really have ever had one bed, and he presses himself around Buck in a way that’s almost suffocating, and Buck lets him. And Eddie’s not sure if it’s because he wants him there, or because he feels like he should. Like he has to.

But as though Buck is reading his mind, he reaches out and takes Eddie’s hand, slipping it into his own, holding on tight. Eddie slips his eyes shut in relief and in sorrow as he presses his lips to the back of Buck’s neck in an almost kiss that never was.

They sleep.

Eddie still doesn’t dream.

-

Eight years later and Christopher would have been seventeen. Eddie wonders if he would have gone to college, but he knows without thinking too long about it, that he would. That they’d find a way. He knows that Buck would be there too, and he’d be making Christopher pancakes in celebration of getting accepted in, big smiles on all of their faces. There’d be laughter and possibility, and a future that doesn’t taste like seawater and smell of snow.

“I think we’re going to have to call the vet, Beverly isn’t looking so good.” Buck says as he opens the front door, boots stamping out the snow on their mat. He hangs his toque and looks to Eddie, freezing as soon as he sees the tears. He undresses his layers quickly after that and is there at his side in a heartbeat, but Eddie pulls away, Buck letting him. “Eddie?”

Eddie looks to him and swallows it all down as he says, “I think it’s time that we go home.”

Buck nods in the face of that, and something tells Eddie that he’s been waiting for him to say this, waiting for a long time. That he has been ready for a while for this, before himself, and for some reasons that makes Eddie angry all over again, but he lets it go as Buck starts making some calls for their horses and animals. Their dog Nia perking her head up as Buck clicks his tongue with a soft command. Eddie feels his heart warm as Nia listens diligently and crawls into his own lap.

Oscar their cat is around here somewhere, too, but Buck doesn’t ask for him right now. Not when Eddie already feels like he’s suffocating in a new found grief that’s raw and stale, and filled with a memory of a face that will never age, nor die.

-

Los Angeles is the same. It’s hot and humid, and terrible. There’s people everywhere and the silence and peace Eddie has grown accustomed to, has found, loved even, is gone. He doesn’t know why he even ever loved it here, but that would be a lie. He knows. He loved it because Christopher did. Somewhere along the way, Eddie finds that he can say his name, even if it’s only in his mind. Maybe coming back here is why, maybe it’s staying away for so long, he doesn’t know.

When they get to the front of his house, Eddie tells Buck, “I think I need to do this alone. You should go and see Maddie, and Bobby.” After so long together, Buck knows that this is what he needs, that he’s telling the truth, but he still hesitates. Stands by him a little too long before nodding, and going. A lingering glance sent his way.

Eddie walks in and his lungs are filled with the past. He breathes it in and wears it like a second skin. There are tears and he cries, but he’s smiling and laughing, too. He feels and he remembers, and it’s painful, but it’s so wonderful, too. He watches Christopher yelling in victory as he beats him and Buck at one of his games. He feels Christopher’s arms wrapping tightly around himself before tucking him in. Smells the pancakes on the stove, and the coffee. Hot chocolate, too, for Christopher. Hears his laughter, feels it like his own.

He blinks and then he sees the reality of an empty house and broken promises. Somewhere in all of it he starts packing, and that’s how Buck finds him sometime into the night. They pack and pack until it’s gone, most of it being discarded, but all of Christopher’s things, they’re taking them with them. Eddie’s taking him home. They both are.

“Do you want to stay?” Eddie asks Buck in the morning hours of a new day. They’re sitting across from one another in an empty house and Buck looks at him like he’s lost his mind. It would be comical if this wasn’t so painful.

“What? Why?” Buck says and Eddie shrugs.

“This was your home.” Eddie tells him, then because maybe he’s a little guilty, too, “You can stay, if you want.” _If that’s what you’ve always wanted, if I took that from you._ “I can take care of the farm.”

Buck narrows his eyes and shakes his head. “My home is there, with you, Eddie. I’m not leaving you. I made a promise, remember?”

Eddie looks down at his tired hands and says, “You made a lot of promises.” But there’s no anger there, not anymore. Just a stale, lost, and unneeded apology.

-

They unpack Christopher’s things in the spare room filled with a single bed and a desk. Eddie filled it unconsciously in the touch of his son, with him in mind. They have a place for Christopher here, they always did, but now with his things here, it’s his home, too. It looks as though he could walk in any moment, as though he never left, and it’s terrible but better somehow. Eddie knows that he never will, but he has a permanent place here, in their home just as much as he has in their hearts.

He’d love Nia and Oscar, the horses, too. Christopher’s always loved animals. Used to always want to go to the zoo or the petting zoo. The aquarium. Learning new things, Buck too. Going from one exhibit to the other, love between them like a father and his son. Like him and Christopher once were, too.

“Looks great.” Buck says wetly, tears in his eyes as he comes in.

Eddie nods, but there’s a lump in his throat and he can’t speak, he can’t find the words, and he doesn’t find them at all until they’re pressed together in bed later that night. The creaking of the wind outside, the slamming of an old cellar door in their backyard that Eddie has yet to fix. It’s here that the words come. And they do come, coming out of his lips in a tidal wave, and the irony of that is not lost on Eddie.

“ _I forgive you, Evan._ ”

Buck freezes, and Eddie sinks lower, sinks more into Buck, forehead pressed into his shoulder, almost like the first time they found themselves here. He says it again because he can, “I forgive you.” More stronger, more sure.

Buck exhales into his hair, shaky and a little lost, as though he’s been crying this whole time and has finally, finally stopped. And in a way, they both have.

That night, Eddie dreams. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me at - https://windsthathowlhere.tumblr.com/  
> 


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